Patent #9,465,604: Mine

Back in February of 2014 our team was moving from Rufus to Coral. We would get kicked out of our old spot on Thursday at around noon or so and we would work from home on Friday.

Most of the team went off to a bowling alley in West Seattle. A few of us would hole up in a conference room to brainstorm ideas for patents.

Now, I’ve written about software patents in the past, and you should know that I’m not a big fan of them. That said, Amazon, except for one main exception that backfired spectacularly, doesn’t use patents in an offensive manner. If an idea is taken out of the pool of patentable ideas then that makes me a happy camper.

Today I learned that my idea from a couple years ago has been issued a patent. Patent number 9,465,604 has been granted.

Technologies are disclosed herein for displaying application content and additional content, such as advertisements, notifications, and other additional content. A first version of additional content may be received by a client device, for example, when the client device is connected to a network, and stored on the client device. The client device may determine if one or more conditions are satisfied for retrieving, over a network, a second version of the additional content. The second version may have a higher video fidelity than the first version. If the one or more conditions are satisfied, the client device may retrieve the second version and display the second version of the additional content. If the one or more conditions are not satisfied, the first version may be retrieved and displayed. Subsequent to displaying the first or the second version of the additional content, the application content may be displayed.

It feels nice to be able to publicly share some of the work I do like this. Since this is a published patent it is no longer something secret.